Art: A HAPPY MR. LINCOLN

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S craggy, compassionate countenance, crinkling with
humor and graven by tragedy, is as familiar to most Americans as the
faces of their own grandfathers. The first great photographer, Matthew
Brady, portrayed Lincoln many times in the course of the Civil War, and
generations of schoolboys have studied Brady's portraits. Few ever saw
the beardless, relatively untried Lincoln opposite, which was displayed
with a Lincoln's Birthday flourish this week in Washington's Corcoran
Gallery.

The picture's shadowy history was pieced together recently by Art
Historian Katharine McCook Knox. A Chicago promoter commissioned the
canvas from the most fashionable portraitist of the day, George...